A fun, practical approach to learning how to work with LLMs in R.  This is a course anyone looking to get a quick overview of the most important aspects of working with the ellmer package.

You'll work with a dataset of dog adoption listings - free-text descriptions written by shelter volunteers about dogs looking for homes. The descriptions are messy and inconsistent, but full of useful information.

Over four chapters, you'll build up to a working chatbot that helps potential adopters find their perfect dog.

Learn to work with LLMs in R

Working with LLMs in R gives you access to data superpowers you didn't have before - extract tidy data from messy text, and create chatbots to talk with your data.  The possibilities are exciting, but it can be hard to know where to start.  This course solves that problem.

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What will you learn?

    1. Welcome! 👋

    2. {ellmer}, providers, and models

    3. Getting set up

    4. Chatting with LLMs

    5. Chat objects

    6. The system prompt

    7. Chapter 1 Quiz

    1. Chat functions

    2. Meet the dogs

    3. Extracting a name

    4. Extracting other attributes

    5. Extracting multiple attributes

    6. Learning about multiple dogs

    7. Chapter 2 Quiz

    1. Checking our results

    2. Introduction to prompt engineering

    3. Adding role and context

    4. Getting more specific

    5. Adding examples

    6. Interpolation

    7. Extracting multiple descriptions

    8. Chapter 3 Quiz

    1. Introduction to tools

    2. Tools to work with data

    3. Tools with parameters

    4. Upgrading the bot

    5. Wrapping Up

    6. Course Feedback

    7. Chapter 4 Quiz

About this course

  • Free
  • 29 lessons
  • 1.5 hours of video content

Who is this for?

- You should be comfortable working with data frames, writing functions, and using pipes in R
- A GitHub account (for free API access via GitHub Models)
- Knowledge of dplyr helps but isn't essential

Meet Nic Crane

Nic Crane

Hi, I'm Nic! I'm an open source developer and R educator. I'm excited to teach this course on LLMs in R.